The Pessimism Line: Why Earth Is Almost Certainly Not the First Civilization

Adam Frank opens with a calculation he published in 2016 with Woody Sullivan. Stop asking how long civilizations last, he says, and ask a narrower question: what is the probability that technological civilizations have arisen *anywhere*, at *any* time, in cosmic history. Exoplanet data now constrain that question. The universe has produced about ten billion trillion habitable-zone planets. Those are ten billion trillion experiments, from chemistry to radio telescopes.

The only way Earth is unique is if every one of those experiments failed. Frank and Sullivan called the threshold the pessimism line: if the probability per habitable-zone planet sits below 10 to the minus 22—one in ten billion trillion—then yes, we are alone. Anywhere above that line, we are not the first. The result, he tells Lex Fridman, was mind-blowing. It does not put neighbors in the next spiral arm. The Milky Way could still be sterile. It only says that unless nature is biased against civilizations, this has happened elsewhere over cosmic history.

Fridman introduces Frank as an astrophysicist who studies star systems and the search for alien civilizations. After two and a half millennia of people yelling at one another—and, Frank notes, occasionally setting one another on fire—over whether anyone else exists, the next ten, twenty, or thirty years will finally deliver relevant data. Even a null result on a stack of planets would start putting limits on how common life is. The first piece of the old argument is already settled: planets are everywhere.

People have argued about planets as long as they have argued about life. Aristotle yelled at Democritus; uniqueness and abundance have traded places for 2,500 years. At the turn of the twentieth century a leading theory said planets formed when two stars passed close enough for gravity to squeeze material out. Those encounters would be so rare that perhaps one star in a trillion would have worlds. The answer, Frank says, arrived in a single lifetime: every star in the night sky has planets.

Frank has spent a career simulating star formation, and the cascade is now tractable enough to watch. You start with a turbulent interstellar cloud that may hold a million solar masses. Dense pockets collapse into protostars; infalling gas spins up into an accretion disk. Dust—he corrects himself, it is really smoke, the tiniest solids—coagulates into pebbles, rocks, boulders, then planetary embryos that slam together. The Moon exists because a Mars-sized body hit the Earth and blew off the debris that later coalesced.

Temperature in the disk falls with distance from the star, and chemistry follows. Close in, only metals freeze out, which is why Mercury is essentially a giant ball of iron. Beyond the snow line, somewhere between Mars and Jupiter, water can freeze. That is why the giant planets’ moons hold so much ice. Several of those moons have more water than Earth. Europa’s ocean, Frank later notes, is about a hundred miles deep under ten miles of ice—twice Earth’s inventory—and it sits *outside* the formal habitable zone.

Once a body is planet-sized, three-dimensional simulations from scratch are still out of reach. Interior structure—solid iron core, liquid iron, rocky mantle, crust—matters enormously, Frank says, because it may decide whether you get plate tectonics, and plate tectonics may have been essential for complex life. He is part of a University of Rochester collaboration using the giant lasers at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics, with an NSF grant, to slam tiny pieces of silica and mimic conditions at Earth’s center and, more importantly, inside super-Earths.

The census of exoplanets has revealed who is average and who is weird. Our solar system is weird. The typical planet weighs a few to about ten Earth masses: smaller ones are called super-Earths, larger ones sub-Neptunes. That is exactly the mass range in which the Sun has nothing. Pressures inside those worlds reach millions to tens of millions of times surface pressure, and nobody knows what the material does. Those details will decide tectonics, atmospheres, and whether a world is a good place for life.

The next generation of astrobiology, Frank argues, has to treat the planet as the subject. You cannot say there is a warm pond and some interesting chemistry happens in it. David Grinspoon and Sara Walker put it in a line he likes: life does not happen on a planet; it happens to a planet. Early Earth was a water world with a few Australia-sized cratons. It went through snowball phases that could have trapped the climate forever if volcanism from active plates had not pumped carbon dioxide back into the air.

Frank had just finished a paper on the hard-steps model, which has long been used to argue that intelligent life is rare. Reading for it, he found that Earth probably had a mild form of plate tectonics early on, then ramped up about a billion years ago. Before that, he jokes, flat-Earthers can get excited for one second: there were not many Himalayan-style ranges. When crusts began colliding, weathering dumped nutrients into the oceans and net primary productivity shot up by a factor of almost a thousand. Plate tectonics, in that sense, supercharged living activity.

Turmoil helped. Abiogenesis is at least 3.8 billion years old, but then came the boring billion: microbes inventing fermentation and not much else. Continents slamming into one another opened and closed niches until, around the Cambrian, every body plan seemed to appear at once. Mass extinctions are not the same story. The K-T impact opened a route for our rodent-like ancestors, but the leap still took 65 million years. Brandon Carter’s anthropic argument—that intelligence arrived suspiciously close to the Sun’s remaining lifetime, so the steps must have been brutally hard—missed the coupling. The Earth, the Sun, and life all run on billion-year clocks, and they slosh back and forth.

Carter, a brilliant physicist, estimated five or six hard steps. A whole literature then proposed different lists: endosymbiosis, complex multicellularity, eyes, land ecosystems. Frank’s plot of those papers is a museum of disagreement. The conceptual structure, he says, does not match what evolutionary biologists and biogeophysicists actually study. Apparent uniqueness can be information loss in an old fossil record, or “pulling up the ladder”: a lineage fills a niche so completely that nobody else can reinvent the trick. He cites an XTC comic whose subtitle is “Why everybody hates physicists.” Sometimes stripping details finds the heart of a problem. Sometimes, especially with complex systems, it clouds over what you needed to see.

Windows open as planet and life co-evolve. About 2.5 billion years ago, a new photosynthesis split water and pumped oxygen into the air, changing planetary chemistry forever and making big brains metabolically possible. You could not get intelligent creatures 100 million years after the planet formed. Fridman notes that this co-evolution makes SETI harder than a static yes-or-no on initial conditions. Frank answers that complex systems still have patterns and constraints. Those constraints, not a frozen starting score, are what the field should be hunting.

James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis proposed Gaia theory in the 1970s: the sum of life hijacks a planet with feedbacks that keep it habitable. It became a New Age festival prop, Frank says, but the physics was about homeostasis, not a conscious Earth. Walk outside at 100 degrees Fahrenheit, or back to a Rochester winter at zero, and your internal temperature stays put. Whether true Gaian control exists is still unclear. What is not unclear is that the biosphere is a major player in Earth’s history, damping planetary perturbations when temperature or sunlight shifts.

With Grinspoon and Walker, Frank wrote about planetary-scale cognition—not consciousness, but a kind of knowing through feedback. They borrowed Francisco Varela’s autopoiesis: life is self-creating and self-maintaining; it does not manufacture the conditions that destroy it. Early after 3.8 billion years ago, microbes were too thin on the ground to exert Gaian feedbacks—an *immature biosphere*. Later, a *mature biosphere* kept the planet in a livable range. Humanity then invented a technosphere in the last couple of hundred years.

That technosphere, they argue, is immature. Climate change and the rest of the Great Acceleration are destroying the conditions the system needs to maintain itself. If we want tens of thousands or millions of years, it has to mature: stop subverting its own life-support. “Save the Earth” is a little ridiculous, Frank says. The Earth is not a furry bunny. The biosphere will not vanish. What is fragile is the Holocene interglacial that grew us. Grinspoon’s “anti-accretion” is the hopeful next step: for the first time in planetary history, stuff is leaving instead of only falling in. If we get through climate change, the prize at the end is the solar system.

In 1960 Frank Drake pointed a radio telescope at a few stars, the first astrobiological experiment in human history. A government call then asked him to convene a meeting on interstellar communication. The night before, with eight people including a young Carl Sagan, he needed an agenda for a topic no one had discussed. The Drake equation broke “how many civilizations can we talk to” into seven factors: star-formation rate, the fraction of stars with planets, planets in the habitable zone, abiogenesis, intelligence, civilization, and lifetime *L*. It was not a law of nature. It quantified ignorance and handed astronomers jobs.

Those jobs became fields. SETI researchers helped push NASA toward planet-hunting technology at meetings in 1978 and 1979. The 1995 detection of a planet around a Sun-like star was, for Frank, the dam breaking. We still have N = 1 for life. One more example, he says, and Bayesian common sense shifts: life is not an accident. The two astronomical terms are now nailed. F sub-p is one. N sub-e, the average number of habitable-zone planets per star, is about one fifth. Count five stars at night; one of them, on average, has an Earth-like world in the liquid-water band.

The habitable zone, formalized in 1958, is a strict starting definition: give a planet an Earth-like atmosphere and ask whether liquid water would pool on the surface instead of freezing or boiling. Frank and Fridman both think it is too strict. Europa is the exhibit. You cannot see life under ten miles of ice from light-years away, though, so the zone still matters for detection: those planets are the ones whose atmospheres we can characterize. Looking up and saying a given star probably has something habitable, defined broadly, is not an unreasonable scientific claim.

Frank loves talking about the Fermi paradox because, he says, there is no Fermi paradox. In 1950 Enrico Fermi walked to lunch at Los Alamos after a *New Yorker* cartoon blamed disappearing New York garbage cans on UFOs. The physicists joked about interstellar propulsion, then moved on. Forty minutes later Fermi blurted, “Well, where is everybody?” If intelligence were common, even sub-light hops could fill the galaxy in a few hundred thousand years. Michael Hart’s 1975 paper turned that into a formal claim: nobody is here now, therefore nobody is anywhere. Call that the *direct* paradox.

After SETI began, a second story took hold: decades of listening, great silence, therefore nothing out there. Frank calls that the *indirect* paradox, and it “absolutely, positively” does not exist, for the mundane reason of money. SETI was always researchers scabbing extra telescope time. Collaborator Jason Wright and students treated the search space as an ocean—stars, radio frequencies, when and how often you look—then summed every published search. If the sky is an ocean, we have looked at a hot tub. No fish in the tub is not “no fish in the ocean.”

The direct version has so many exits there is a book titled *Seventy-Seven Solutions to the Fermi Paradox*. Frank’s group ran an agent-based simulation of probes moving star to star. The expansion wave does cross the galaxy quickly, as Fermi and Hart said. Give civilizations finite lives of 10,000 or 100,000 years and you get a steady state with holes millions of years wide. We may live in one of those bubbles. A visit 100 million years ago would leave no iPhones and no toppled buildings. With Gavin Schmidt, Frank wrote the Silurian hypothesis, named for a *Doctor Who* episode: even a large industrial civilization lasting 10,000 years would vanish from a sparse fossil record. The only possible clue is isotopic strata. They are not claiming Silurians existed. Schmidt’s question was simply, how could you tell?

Back at the 2016 paper—“A New Empirical Constraint on the Prevalence of Technological Species in the Universe”—Frank stresses what the astronomy actually bought. The lifetime term cannot be touched, so they removed time and asked only whether technological species have ever occurred. Giordano Bruno was burned in 1600 for being an alien optimist, and nobody knew what optimism or pessimism numerically meant. Frank thinks of 10 to the minus 22 as a Planck length of astrobiology. Above that line, other civilizations have occurred. The burden of proof is now on the pessimists.

His gut, looking at Earth, is that dumb life is common and basic biology is not hard to start, even if the process still demands a rethinking of what life is. Fridman is more aggressive: once you have bacteria and a couple of billion years to spare, complex life is off to the races. The boring billion is a mystery of windows, not a veto. The term Frank worries about is *L*. Radio telescopes are a century old. Another 10,000 or 100,000 years would feel miraculous to us and still barely move galactic occupancy. You need hundreds of millions of years. That raises what he calls the billionaire civilization: how do you even think systematically about a technological society across a billion years?

With David Kipping and Caleb Scharf he ran a Bayesian calculation: given a detection, is the source younger, our age, or older? Intuition hedges; the formalism says probably much older. Biological evolution would unmake the founders. Social forms might be continuous or punctuated—collapse, return, collapse. Agent-based models of the kind Santa Fe uses for hierarchies are, he thinks, a frontier, not a fantasy. Fridman asks whether a Mars settlement would fight like nations. Frank says the moment you have a million people you have two tribes. *The Expanse* is his recommended course in interplanetary politics. Spinning up asteroids until rock fails is not workable; wrapping small asteroids in nanofiber bags might inflate habitats with a Manhattan’s worth of interior. None of that is a backup plan for climate change or nuclear war. A self-sufficient Mars base is centuries away. The solar system is the prize after we solve the problems here.

Frank no longer likes the word SETI. Classic SETI is Jodie Foster in headphones, and it required a beacon aimed at us by someone who wanted to be found. Exoplanets opened a different window. We know where to look and how. We can search for passive imprints of a biosphere or technosphere doing its ordinary work. Oxygen plus methane on Earth would vanish quickly without life; seeing both on another world is a fair bet on a biosphere. He is principal investigator on NASA’s first grant to study exoplanet technosignatures, after the agency had grown gun-shy about intelligent life.

The textbook technosignature is chlorofluorocarbons. Humanity dumped CFCs by accident, damaged ozone, and put so much into the air that Frank’s group showed the spectral fingerprint could be seen across interstellar distances. Nature has no other way to make those molecules. Other entries in the first-ever technosignature library include the glint of solar panels—a jump in reflected light that Manasvi Lingam and Avi Loeb flagged in 2017—and city lights. Scale Coruscant or Trantor up and Thomas Beatty’s work says the sodium-lamp imprint could be visible at 20 to 30 light-years. Sophia Sheikh’s “Earth from Earth” study found most of our own technosignatures would still need to be seen from inside the Oort cloud; radio remains the loudest.

Agnostic signatures try to drop Earth’s résumé. Chemical reaction networks in biology look unlike rock-and-water networks. Information theory can ask whether an atmosphere carries too much structure to be geology. Disequilibrium is the blunt version: life is far from equilibrium, and Gibbs free energy can flag an atmosphere that is being pumped and not allowed to relax. Direct imaging with the next telescopes after JWST will still be a pixel, light for a spectrograph, not a postcard. The wilder idea is a solar gravitational-lens telescope: send probes about 500 times farther from the Sun than Earth, look back, and let the Sun focus an exoplanet’s light. If it holds, resolution could reach 24 kilometers—Manhattan on another world. The concept has already survived three NASA wacky-idea gates. Frank expects to be dead; Fridman, as an old man, might see it.

JWST still amazes him because he was skeptical it would unfold. Spectra, not sexy pictures, are the point: find terrestrial atmospheres, then characterize carbon, carbon dioxide, oxygen, methane. K2-18b, 120 light-years away, yielded data good enough to suggest a hycean world—hydrogen ocean, perhaps eight Earth masses, a hydrogen greenhouse over a ~60-degree sea. Methane was a five-sigma detection, “the gold standard of science.” A confirmed technosignature ten light-years out would not end the story. It would launch bigger telescopes and, perhaps, a Breakthrough Starshot-style lightsail: decades to build, a decade to fly, a decade for pictures to return. Cathedral time. Finding even microbial life, Frank says, would mean we are not an accident, and that we belong to a cosmic community of living things.

Freeman Dyson’s 1960 point was practical: if you want a detectable civilization, imagine one that harvests its star. A rigid sphere is unstable; he meant a swarm of orbiting collectors. Boyajian’s Star produced dragon-tooth dips that a paper listed as comets, rubble, or an alien megastructure. Newsfeeds printed only the last. It was probably gas or dust, but it proved the observational channel. A swarm would blink irregularly—*beep, beep, blip*—unlike the handful of planets in a stable system. Jason Wright’s group at Penn State hunts the infrared waste heat the second law demands. They have eliminated many candidates and kept a few anomalies they will not call detections, and will not call non-detections either. A denser, smaller idea is a Clarke belt: nothing natural piles into geosynchronous orbit, but a civilization using that orbit heavily might transit as a planetary-scale ring.

Nikolai Kardashev, in the same SETI golden age, ranked civilizations by energy. Type I uses the starlight falling on a planet; Type II uses the star (the Dyson swarm); Type III uses a galaxy. On a log scale humanity sits at 0.7. One paper guessed Type I around the year 2300. Type I is about 10 to the 16 watts; Type II is ten orders of magnitude higher. Kardashev counted harvest, not the second law. Use the energy and you make waste heat, the way a gasoline tank heats an engine block. We probably cannot reach Type I without devastating Earth’s climate. That is why space matters. Frank’s group has been developing “service worlds”: move industry to a dead place such as Mercury. The biosphere is more powerful than we are. Ten times more energy will not be used on-world.

Almost every technological civilization, their models suggest, triggers its own planetary climate crisis. The question is whether you are smart enough to readjust so the biosphere becomes more productive, healthy, and resilient. That was the subject of *Light of the Stars*, an astrobiology of the Anthropocene. Type II signatures might include fusion-drive propulsion plumes from space truckers on the Enceladus run—Thomas Beatty has a NASA proposal—or dust tailings from asteroid mining. In the solar system itself, micrometeorite “gardening” implies the Apollo landers could remain recognizable for hundreds of millions to billions of years. A test algorithm pointed at an Apollo site pulled the lander out immediately. Warp drives and Alcubierre metrics still need exotic matter that does not exist; dropping out of warp, someone calculated, might spray gamma rays and sterilize the destination. Frank likes science fiction that takes the speed of light seriously. We live in a Great Acceleration and should not assume the tools never flatten, as they did for most of human history.

Anything we would call life, Frank thinks, probably runs on Darwinian logic: solve physical and chemical problems or die. Convergence should yield classes of solutions—jointed sticks for moving on a hard surface, wings wherever air is dense enough for lift. Insects, bats, and the dinosaur-to-bird line invented wings independently. Contingency is the other half. Stephen Jay Gould doubted that replaying Earth’s tape would return familiar species. *E. coli* freeze-restart experiments, so far, suggest accidents matter. Expect legs; do not expect a humanoid with sensors on a neck. Cognition need not live in one skull. Frank’s word of the day is liquid brains. Jason Wright likens intelligence to a deck of cards dealt across the biosphere; we happened to hold the hand that built telescopes.

On contact, he is cautious about METI, messaging extraterrestrial intelligence. Who speaks for Earth? He would not assume a long-lived species wears togas and sings “Kumbaya,” nor that its cognitive structure shares a universe with ours. *Arrival* is his favorite warning: the Carl Sagan character fails immediately; the linguist understands that language is embodied. A 10-million-year-old civilization might simply be bored of talking to youngers. Directed panspermia and alien gardeners fail Occam’s razor: they kick abiogenesis down the road. Artifact hunts on the Moon and in stable orbits are still worth doing, he says, even if they sit low on his probability list. Scientists would get little say if we actually found someone. Militaries and markets would move first.

He is “all in favor” of open, agnostic, transparent scientific study of UFOs and UAPs. None of the framed data, in his view, lives up to the standards of evidence required to claim non-human technology. Scientists are brutal to one another because four hundred years of those standards are why cell phones work. If his team announced an exoplanet technosignature they would be shredded, as they expect to be. The UAP community should not get a pass because the topic is cool. Instruments should look up, down, and around: meteor cameras, satellite sensors, a red button in the cockpit that triggers characterized detectors whose every wavelength, software limit, and repair history is known before anyone claims a right turn at Mach 500.

Given a trillion dollars, he would look *out*, not at Earth. If you want Nebraskans, go to Nebraska, not the Himalayas. The “high-beam argument” asks why a shy super-civilization would be so bad at hiding that we keep glimpsing it. His 2021 *New York Times* op-ed sent him into SIGINT and electronic-intelligence circles, where people were not talking about UFOs. They were talking about pure-state adversaries: cheap drones that spoof sensors so the other side cranks radars up and leaks their electromagnetic signatures. Fridman still wants a case for robot-ant diplomacy. Frank answers with Greg Bear’s *Eon*, which helped make him more than agnostic about METI: arrival as theater, dark-forest motives. Life’s open-ended creativity still awes him. Give him a star’s mass and he can sketch its death. Give him a cell and he cannot predict a kangaroo. That is why finding any life would be, for him, the most important discovery in human history.

The biggest unsolved problem in physics, Frank now thinks, is not black holes. It is the difference between a rock and a cell, which is to say agency: how an autonomous agent happens. He is not a reductionist waiting for enough chemicals to go bang. In *The Blind Spot*, written with Marcelo Gleiser and Evan Thompson, the metaphor is the optic nerve. Vision requires it, and you are blind to the hole it makes. Science, as historically configured, pushed experience—presence, the phenomenological life-world, the raw given you cannot leave until you die—out of the frame so it could make progress. That move is a metaphysics glued onto science: reductionism, a God’s-eye third person, physicalism, the reification of mathematics. It worked until quantum mechanics, time, and consciousness came back to bite.

The parable of temperature is the book’s easiest door. We began with hot and cold. Science extracted what Michel Bitbol calls structural invariants, built mercury thermometers, then thermodynamics. We now check a phone, see 60 degrees, and treat the number as more real than the bodily, shared remark “cold today, isn’t it?” Husserl called the swap surreptitious substitution; Frank also says amnesia of experience, and “don’t confuse the map for the terrain.” The crisis of meaning is that science tells us we are insignificant machines while cosmology and the measurement problem put us at the center. Scientific triumphalism answers by declaring only formal truths real. Postmodern dismissal and science denial answer by shoving science away. Pseudoscience answers by inflating experience without rigor. Arrogance on the first side, he and Fridman agree, feeds rejection on the others.

Quantum mechanics announced from the start that measurement matters: a Schrödinger equation plus a Born rule. Many-worlds invents infinite unobservable universes to pretend otherwise. Frank advocates QBism—quantum Bayesianism—which puts the agent’s action, the information returned, and updated priors at the center. The same grammar appears in a Templeton-funded project on semantic information in cells: not Shannon surprise, but whether a message helps a creature stay alive. A cell climbing a chemical gradient toward food has the architecture of an agent acting on a world. He wants hard, experimental science that never forgets that agency. String theory’s “real soon” years and post-empirical weirdness look, to him, like physicists smoking their own stash. A new physics of time might start from the fact that clocks do not tell time; we use clocks to tell time.

Henri Bergson pressed Einstein on duration: lived time is stretched, with a little past, future, and present at once, as in a melody. Whitehead’s line is that science and philosophy explain the abstract; the concrete between two speakers is given. Free will, Frank says, is given with agency. Calling experience an illusion already occupies the third-person view that needs explaining—turtles all the way down, a religious impulse toward God’s living room. Analytic philosophy dominates the public conversation; phenomenology—Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty—does not. Nagarjuna and Vasubandhu, Plato and Aristotle of their traditions, reasoned *from* experience because they could not get out of it. Robert Rosen’s contentious proof claimed living systems are not Church-Turing complete. Information-theoretic ε-machines suggest macrostates can decouple from microstates: downward causation. *Science*, *Nature Physics*, and even the *Wall Street Journal* reviewed the book well. David Krakauer’s work at Santa Fe shows individuality is fluid: liver cell, liver, person, language community, biosphere. Kant coined “organism” because life’s organization is not a machine.

Asked whether machines can have agency, Frank will not rule it out. There is no reason the autopoietic strange loop cannot happen in silicon, but it would not be “just like us, instantiated.” Large language models, in his view, are not there. He leans on 4E cognition: embodied, embedded, enacted, extended. A brain-in-a-vat argument he reported with Thompson ends by requiring a body, even a robot body. Fridman objects that human infants are imitation machines, and personality grows from the tension among copies. Frank grants the possibility and still thinks imitation without a world does not buy the loop. Gregory Bateson once asked Jonas Salk where his mind was. Salk pointed at his head. Bateson said, “No, no, no. Out here.” Experience, Frank adds, is not a thing you have. It is a thing you do.

Does a finite lifetime make him sad? No. Full reveal: he has practiced in the Zen tradition for thirty years—“staring at a wall.” It taught him that he does not matter that much. “Adam Frank” is largely a construct; a process is happening; it will go. Zen’s “beyond birth and death” is not reincarnation. It means you do not yet understand what life is, so your ideas of death are equally ill-formed. At a sesshin from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m., the first half hour is taxes, to-do lists, and the other guy’s shoes. His first two-day sit played Bruce Springsteen’s *Born to Run* all the way through, LP pauses included. Hate the cushion long enough and roof-brain chatter exhausts itself. Boredom is when something interesting starts. Then it is physical: riding the breath, thoughts still occurring but not occupying you, sometimes the self dropping into raw presence, sometimes an hour of grief. The vow is not to be moved. He is still, he says, the same New Jersey asshole, with more space.

Koans are a thousand-year teaching method. “Stop the sound of the distant temple bell” still makes him say *what?* You do not tell the answer; you show it. Over years the slogan “everything changes” becomes something you feel breath to breath, sometimes as joy attached to nothing: moment-to-moment passage is how things are, and it is okay—not because he wants it to be. Fridman holds joy and Eastern European melancholy as brothers. Frank, with the same roots, says you do not have to manipulate that pair. Why are we here? He warns that the answer is corny. Love. He is not messing around. He came to practice for knowledge and because he was suffering, and filed compassion under “whatever.” You cannot reach that depth without it. The world gives itself unhindered—blue sky, breath—and then you notice who is not having that experience. Everybody is suffering, including your worst political opponent. Drop the stories. Fridman hopes alien civilizations are on the same path from suffering toward love. Frank hopes so too. “That, or they’re coming to eat us.” Especially, Fridman adds, if they are Type III. “That’s right. And they got really big guns.”